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DON’T MISS!: ON HER SIDE
Ani DiFranco, the Buffalo, NY-based folk-singing political firebrand, is getting ready for a break from touring now that she’s pregnant with her second child (due in April). “It’s hard to find enough air to sing sometimes, especially when you walk on stage with a baby and dinner in there,” DiFranco says. “But it’s actually really fun to know that the kid is in there experiencing a barrage of sound and me jumping around like a monkey.”
Nevertheless, the hard-performing singer-songwriter is hardly ready to stop making music altogether. “I’ve got a bunch of new songs, and I’m gonna start recording them next month,” says DiFranco, who released “¿Which Side Are You On?” earlier this year.
Catch her before her break, at Music Hall of Williamsburg (66 N. Sixth St., Brooklyn; 718-486-5400) tonight and at Town Hall (123
W. 43rd St.; 212-840-2824) tomorrow.
— Michaelangelo Matos

CHECK IT OUT!: OUTSIDE THE RING
And you thought he just painted boxing matches! But George Bellows (1882-1925) was so much more — a reporter who worked with a brush. City scenes and seascapes, polo matches and nudes: Bellows painted them all. Now the Met’s filled 10 galleries with what curator Barbara Weinberg calls “powerful and amazingly varied works”: bustling scenes of Times Square, the splashy sunlight of Coney Island, the wild beauty of Woodstock, Montauk and Maine. Here, too, are his portraits, not only of his wife and muse, Emma, and their children, but of a buck-toothed Paddy Flanigan, all rendered with the luminous dignity of an El Greco. “There are only three things demanded of a painter,” Bellows said. “To see things, to feel them and to dope them out for the public.” He died at age 42, of a ruptured appendix. One can only imagine what more he could have given us with time. Fifth Avenue at 80th Street; metmuseum.org.
— Barbara Hoffman

WATCH IT!: NOIR TOWN
Hollywood’s very first film noir, Boris Ingster’s rarely screened “The Stranger on the Third Floor’’ (1940), stars a memorable Peter Lorre in the title role, committing a murder wrongly blamed on a taxi driver. That cabbie is played by Elisha Cook Jr., who also appeared in the second film noir, “The Maltese Falcon,” released a year later. Introduced by film director William Lustig, “Stranger” will be shown Sunday at 7:15 p.m. as part of Anthology Film Archives’ tribute to the Warner Archive Collection manufacture-on-demand DVD program. Another great noir set in New York, Ted Tetzlaff’s “The Window’’ (1949), follows at 8:45.
Second Avenue and Second Street; info at anthologyfilmarchives.org.
— Lou Lumenick

LISTEN UP!: YOU’VE GOT WHALE
“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” the narrator of “Moby-Dick” said, it was time for him to hit the high seas. For the rest of us, though, perhaps it’s better to head to a cozy bookstore or two and listen to some of the hundred-plus locals who’ll participate in a marathon reading of the Herman Melville classic in its entirety through the weekend.
Kicking things off will be actor Paul Dano, with the famous first words “Call me Ishmael . . .” at 6 tonight at Greenpoint’s WORD bookstore. “To read the whole book aloud in a weekend sounded just crazy enough to be fun,” Dano says, encouraging people to come “see what story feels like through a small community in a room.”
From there, the free readings — from authors Jonathan Ames, Sarah Vowell, Lev Grossman and many more — will take place at SoHo’s Housing Works Bookstore starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow, then Molasses Books in Bushwick at 4 p.m., and running at Housing Works on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Details at mobydickmarathonnyc.org.
— Sara Stewart

Bettmann/CORBIS

CHEW ON THIS!: NEW FORK CITY
Ever wonder what Kublai Khan’s dinner looked like, how Jane Austen was able to make ice cream before refrigeration or how many egg sandwiches Michael Phelps scarfs down in a day? Find out at the American Museum of Natural History starting tomorrow as part of “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture,” an exhibit examining the anatomy of the food chain. It includes a replica of an Aztec marketplace and a kitchen from Whole Foods, where chefs will show off how cider and bread are made (with samples for patrons, too).
The food system “has enormous implications in terms of environment and human health,” museum president Ellen Futter says. “Most people don’t stop to think about the vast interwoven web that gets the food to the fork.”
Central Park West at 79th Street; 212-769-5100, amnh.org.
— Tim Donnelly